Can anyone recommend a propogation tray? The ones I bought in garden centre aren't great. They're quite flimsy and have broken up already.

Also I suspect they weren't big enough - they're about the size of a full egg. Leeks, for example, never seemed to grow more than a few inches in them. Not sure if that was the tray or the compost running out of nutrients?

What do people use and how big should they be? I've seen people use half a milk carton or egg containers, though the latter don't hold that much soil either

You will get what you pay for mange tout. Them flimsy ones aint worth a shite. Buy the rigid ones, might be €2 or €3 each but they will last forever. Go to a garden centre and study what they use and observe the height of plants they can get from a 'full egg' sized pot. Better still go to a nursery and see what they use and you then do the same. Fresh compost at the start of every year is the only way to go._________________“It’s my field. It’s my child. I nursed it. I nourished it. I saw to its every want. I dug the rocks out of it with my bare hands and I made a living thing of it!”

To be perfectly honest, there's absolutely NO need to buy trays. I'm the Recycling Manager in our house and find the huge range of food trays we throw out gives a variety of trays of varying depths etc. I use a deeper one for leeks, as you say, shallow ones for lettuces and runner beans and so on._________________A novice gardener on newly cultivated, stoney ground.

Going to go full milk carton horizontal depth for those leeks so. Would MUCH prefer to recycle. My sons advent calendar toy container is my latest acquisition. The flimsy ones weren't even that cheap tagwex! big variation in the quality of crap garden centres will sell you.

On compost - I've got John Innes seed compost, which was really heavy, like clay, not fine at all. Thought there was something wrong but stuff coming up so seems ok. But should I pot them on in a few weeks into some other stuff?

I mean how do people do it, buy two or three bags of different stage compost each season and pot everything on and on or just go with the flow and use whatever?

I go to a nursery, far better for a multitude of reasons than any garden centre. They have leeks for example, in the flimsy trays, a foot high in 40mm to 50mm of soil and several of them per pod. So it can be done. The seed trays are black for a reason. Never seen a black milk carton._________________“It’s my field. It’s my child. I nursed it. I nourished it. I saw to its every want. I dug the rocks out of it with my bare hands and I made a living thing of it!”

Good point re colour tagwex. But re height, could it just be they've lashed in fertilizer? I always presume any purchased plant is beefed up for visual market and is as far from organic as you can get.

I have purchased many a 12 section tray of veg plants from my local nursery and they always fare better than my home grown from seeds efforts. They have the knack, the know how and the controlled climatic conditions that I don't have, they have to to make it commercially viable for them.
As for Dublin nurseries, there has to be loads, hit the google button. I would always go to a nursery over a garden centre._________________“It’s my field. It’s my child. I nursed it. I nourished it. I saw to its every want. I dug the rocks out of it with my bare hands and I made a living thing of it!”

I take the attitude that I just need some sort of medium/soil substitute to get my plants started and have just bought three bags of El Cheapo 'compost' from Lidl. That, plus water, is quite enough to set the process in motion and I'd suggest unnecessary transplanting into different composts can disturb and damage root systems?

Once they're big enough to handle, I move seedlings into their final growing place. Dib a hole. A few grains of fertiliser in (chicken manure pellets in my case), and that's it._________________A novice gardener on newly cultivated, stoney ground.

On reflection and experimentation, I couldn't agree more with Blowin's advice, the range and selection of junk packaging modern life leaves us with is remarkable. I suppose my only concern is that seed roots will get tangled up (in something like a milk carton) but hopefully not.

I've just sown a load of nasturtiums, calendula and sunflowers (two to a pot) into individual, square pots that I got from B&M 10 for £1.00.I know the packets say to sow direct, but in my garden that's just feeding the slugs!

I'll get several years use out of these pots and being square I can pack them together in gravel trays. I get good results from 'Jacks Magic' compost.

I have tried growing sweet peas and beans in toilet roll centres - some good results, some awful. They give a good root run but you have to watch the watering. Sometimes when you plant out, the soggy bottom half drops off and you end up hold a small ring of dry card and a plant with it's roots now devoid of soil - and that can be very difficult to plant. _________________Plant Trees, Save Lives

I always seem to do better starting runner beans off in an 'open' tray, rather than a sectioned one, for some reason. The roots do get a bit tangled but I'm just careful as I separate them when planting out. However, with something like swedes where the actual root is the crop, I revert to sectioned trays with one seedling per section. This has three advantages: a) there's no thinning process to disturb the ones you keep, b) there are no 'misses', so you can finish up with a complete row of plants and c) there's less risk of damaging the root itself. I always do swedes this way, and may trial a tray of parsnips this year as they're notoriously bad germinators._________________A novice gardener on newly cultivated, stoney ground.

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